Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)

New Books in Technology · Feb 20, 2026 · 1h 11m

PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions (MIT Press, 2026) is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market…